Slowhand - Philip Norman

Philip Norman is an English novelist, biographer, journalist and playwright. At the end of the 1960s, as a correspondent for The Sunday Times, he was assigned to investigate and report on the breakup of Beatles' own business, Apple Corps. Norman is the author of SHOUT! and biographies of John Lennon, Buddy Holly, The Rolling Stones, Elton John, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton.

Slowhand reads like a textbook account of all the pathologies of the rock-star life: promiscuity, infidelity, heroin addiction, alcoholism
SUNDAY TIMES - Victoria Segal

It has taken a biographer as perceptive and clear-sighted as Philip Norman to do Clapton justice ... Despite everything, you end up liking Clapton, and feeling as if you know and understand him. It is proof that Norman's biography has done its work
THE TIMES - Will Hodgkinson

As usual, the masterful biographer Philip Norman has unearthed countless fascinating details
DAILY MAIL - Mark Mason

On a mission to expose the music of the US south to a new audience in as pure a form as possible, [Clapton] captured the raw emotion of the sound he loved enough to transfix his young listeners. A generation was discovering an alien language with which they instinctively felt at home. That cultural leap - which began with conversations in record shops, coffee bars and art schools, and eventually swept the world - is one of the key stories of the last century and is always worth re-examining, as Philip Norman does in this biography of one of the movement's pioneers
THE GUARDIAN

Solid and sad
DAILY TELEGRAPH Music Books of the Year - Helen Brown

Lucid
FINANCIAL TIMES - Peter Aspden

Many unexpected details have been unearthed by an author painting a vivid picture of a man whose extraordinary career has been carved out of his ability "to conjure magic from a slab of electrified wood"
THE BEAT - Russell Newmark

Extraordinary stories ... the entire tale, including how, miraculously, late in life Clapton learned to function as a normal, civilised person, enjoying a long and apparently faithful second marriage, is told with wonderful vividness
ROCK N REEL - Trevor Hodgett